Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： It is well-known that attentional orienting is contingent on the features of attentional settings, and in recent years, an increasing number of studies have supported that the meaningful contingency between cue and target stimuli modulates spatial attention. However, the spatial distribution of meaning-guided attentional orienting has not been thoroughly elucidated, especially in noncentral space. To address this issue, we examined the attentional orienting effects by establishing the meaningful contingency between the objects and how the attentional orienting was affected by the nature of the objects. Furthermore, the attentional distribution in the noncentral fields was analyzed. A modified spatial cueing paradigm was employed in the current study. In Experiment 1, cues were presented as strawberry or watermelon sketches, and targets were presented in red or green. The participants were asked to discriminate the location of the gap of the target square in different cue-target blocks. Experiment 2 was identical to Experiment 1, except that the cues were white Chinese characters, “红” (meaning red) or “绿” (meaning green), and the number of possible positions was increased from four to six. Experiment 3 was identical to Experiment 2, except that the cue and target stimuli were swapped, where cues were presented in red or green and targets were Chinese characters in white. The results indicated that the inhibition effects were found in the lower spatial field and the increasing capture effects were found in the left and right and the upper spatial fields when the sketches were adopted as cues in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, it was found that there was a general trend of inhibition and capture effects from the lower to upper locations, but only part of the inhibition effects reached significance when the number of the positions was increased and the Chinese character cues were employed. Experiment 3 replicated the results obtained in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 when color cues were utilized, but more robust inhibition and capture effects were obtained. The results of this study indicated that (1) the meaningful contingency between the objects guided the visuospatial attentional orienting, highlighting the inhibition and capture effects in different visuospatial fields; (2) the nature of the object modulated the meaningful-contingent attentional orienting, showing that the more vivid the object was, the more modulated it was, whereas the more abstract the object was, the less modulated it was; and (3) the meaningful-contingent attentional orienting was performed regularly in different visual fields, highlighting the location-based inhibition and capture from the lower to the upper fields.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Mediation and moderation analyses are commonly used methods for studying the relationship between an independent variable (X) and a dependent variable (Y) in conducting empirical research. To better understand the relationships among variables, there is an increasing demand for a more general theoretical framework that combines moderation and mediation analyses. Recently, statistical analysis of mediated moderation (meMO) effects has become a powerful tool for scientists to investigate complex processes. However, the traditional meMO model is formulated based on the homoscedasticity assumption, which is most likely to be violated when moderation effects exist. In addition, routinely reporting effect sizes has been recommended as the primary solution to the issue of overemphasis on significance testing. Appropriate effect sizes (ES) for measuring meMO effects are very important in reporting and interpreting inferential results. However, there does not exist an effective measure that allows us to answer the question regarding the extent to which a variable Z moderates the effect of X on Y via the mediator variable (M) in the meMO model. The article is organized as follows. First, the two-level moderated regression model proposed by Yuan, Cheng, & Maxwell (2014) was extended to a two-level mediated moderation (2meMO) model with single-level data, the statistical path diagram was structured according to the conceptual model and the equations. Second, several effect sizes were developed for the 2meMO effect by decomposing the total variance of the moderation effect. Third, to estimate the parameters of the 2meMO model and the ES measures of the meMO effects, we developed a Bayesian estimation method to estimate the parameters of the 2meMO model. Fourth, a Monte Carlo simulation study was conducted to evaluate the performance of the 2meMO model and the proposed ES measures against those with the meMO model. Finally, we illustrate the application of the new model and measures with a real data example. The simulation results indicate that the size of bias and MSE for parameter estimates are small under both meMO and 2meMO models whether the homoscedasticity assumption hold or not. The results of the coverage rate of the 95% CI for difmoMEdifmoMEdi{{f}_{moME}} following 2meMO is comparable to those following meMO when the variance of moderation error is zero, which is the assumption the meMO model is based. However, when the moderation-error variance is nonzero, 2meMO yields more accurate estimates for difmeMOdifmeMOdi{{f}_{meMO}}. than meMO does, the advantages of 2meMO over meMO become more obvious as the moderation-error variance increases. The results of Type I error rate indicate that 2meMO controls Type I error rather well, and the rates are close to 0.05 or below 0.05 under all the conditions. However, the Type I error rates of meMO tend to be higher than 0.05 when the moderation-error variance is nonzero. The power rates following the meMO and 2meMO models are comparable for the medium or large sample size, or when there is a large difference in meMO effects. While the value of power following 2meMO is slightly lower than that following meMO at small sample se, this result is mostly due to the inflated Type I error rate of meMO, and larger sample sizes and the smaller moderation-error variances correspond to more accurate estimates of ϕ(f)meMOϕ(f)meMO\phi _{meMO}^{(f)}. The results also indicate that, when the homoscedasticity assumption of the meMO model is satisfied, the effect size estimates following the two models are about the same. However, when the moderation-error variance is not zero, the results following 2meMO are more accurate than those following meMO. In summary, the article developed a 2meMO model with single-level data and proposed several measures to evaluate the size of the meMO effect explained by moderator variables in total, directly, or indirectly. The performance of the 2meMO model is compared against that of the traditional meMO model via Monte Carlo simulations. Results indicate that, when the assumption of homoscedasticity holds, 2meMO yields comparable results with those under meMO. When the homoscedasticity assumption is violated, estimates under 2meMO are more accurate than those under meMO. More importantly, the measures of the size of the meMO effect proposed in this article can be used as a supplement to the test of meMO effects and will meet the needs for reporting ES in practice. Consequently, the 2meMO model is recommended for the analysis of mediated moderation, and the effect sizes (ESs) for the interpretation of the effect according to the questions of interest are better reported.
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